The success of populist candidates and rhetoric, coupled with a perceived degradation in politica... more The success of populist candidates and rhetoric, coupled with a perceived degradation in political discourse, have raised concerns over fraying democratic institutions even in stable wealthy democracies. These developments make particularly relevant the modest, grounded liberalism developed in Michael Schudson’s work, with its focus on the possibilities of actually existing democracy. They also offer a moment to ask what are the conditions and limits of the optimism that characterizes much of that work. This essay reviews the analytical and normative framework for understanding contemporary democracy that Schudson develops, centered on the notion of monitorial citizenship elaborated in The Good Citizen and The Rise of the Right to Know. I read this work against the grain to suggest that it represents a fusion of classically liberal and “critical cultural” perspectives. I draw attention to the messy but more or less reasonable public sphere that emerges in the episodes Schudson visits, underwritten by a quality of institutional coherence grounded in strong democratic norms governing elite behavior. Finally, I suggest that those conditions have depended on a tenuous historical balance between political consensus, on one hand, and the opening up of politics and public life Schudson chronicles so well, on the other.
This article presents a detailed ethnographic account of objective practice among professional fa... more This article presents a detailed ethnographic account of objective practice among professional fact checkers, reporters who specialize in assessing the truth of political claims. Some critics argue that political debate is inherently value-laden and defies objective fact checking ; I offer an alternative view highlighting the practical epistemology revealed in the news-work routines and discourse of working fact checkers. Drawing links between core concepts in the sociology of science and journalism studies, this analysis highlights how in moments of institutional unsettlement, verification relies on factual coherence, rather than straightforward correspondence. To develop this argument, I anatomize a fact check produced as a participant observer with a major national fact-checking organization.
While fact-checking has grown dramatically in the last decade, little is known about the relative... more While fact-checking has grown dramatically in the last decade, little is known about the relative effectiveness of different formats in correcting false beliefs or overcoming partisan resistance to new information. This article addresses that gap by using theories from communication and psychology to compare two prevailing approaches: An online experiment examined how the use of visual “truth scales” interacts with partisanship to shape the effectiveness of corrections. We find that truth scales make fact-checks more effective in some conditions. Contrary to theoretical predictions and the fears of some journalists, their use does not increase partisan backlash against the correction or the organization that produced it.
Why has fact-checking spread so quickly within U.S. political journalism? In the first field expe... more Why has fact-checking spread so quickly within U.S. political journalism? In the first field experiment conducted among reporters, we varied journalist exposure to messages that highlight either audience demand for fact-checking or the prestige it enjoys within the profession. Our results indicate that messages promoting the high status and journalistic values of fact-checking increased the prevalence of fact-checking coverage, while messages about audience demand were somewhat less successful. These findings suggest that political fact-checking is driven primarily by professional motives within journalism, a finding that helps us understand the process by which the practice spreads within the press as well as the factors that influence the behavior of journalists.
The last five years have seen a global surge in political fact-checking, reporting that specializ... more The last five years have seen a global surge in political fact-checking, reporting that specializes in debunking political misinformation. A growing occupational movement, originating in the United States but increasingly international in scope, has sought to legitimize fact-checking as unbiased journalism, to establish common standards and practices, and to secure reliable funding for this emerging genre. As a genuinely transnational professional movement which includes practitioners from multiple journalistic cultures as well as other fields, fact-checking offers a new site to consider whether and how professional journalism is meaningfully becoming globalized. This paper models a novel approach to mapping a diverse organizational landscape in terms of institutional ties to the fields of journalism, academia, and politics. Drawing on fieldwork from two international gatherings of fact-checkers, I array fact-checking outlets on a ternary graph and review their competing understandings of the mission, the target, and the practices of fact-checking. I highlight areas of convergence as well as divergence in this organizational milieu, focusing particular attention on boundaries not drawn—the willingness of professional journalists in this global movement to share jurisdictional authority with non-journalists. I conclude with suggestions for a comparative research agenda focused on this emergent area of practice.
Global Media and Communication 7(2) intellectual property' as one of the major threats, along wit... more Global Media and Communication 7(2) intellectual property' as one of the major threats, along with terrorism, of a wide open internet. James Boyle describes quite a different danger in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Boyle, 2008), an informative and thoughtful case for rethinking our ever-stricter IP regimes. Boyle's book is lucidly and engagingly written; one believes Yochai Benkler, whose Wealth of Networks ) remains a touchstone for the key economic, legal, and democratic arguments for IP reform, when he blurbs that this is the 'first book' he'd give to someone wading into these intellectual waters. The small price of Boyle's strenuous fairness is only to bring into sharper relief the difficult question of why we get the IP rules we do. He wrestles with this question openly but not very satisfyingly.
Organized journalism in every era offers examples of news sharing: cooperative practices by which... more Organized journalism in every era offers examples of news sharing: cooperative practices by which rival news outlets work together to produce or distribute news. Today, this behavior is being institutionalized by certain emergent news organizations. To understand news sharing, we argue, requires attention to how these journalists seek to not only practice but repair the field of journalism. This article analyzes news sharing as a form of field repair, drawing on ethnographic studies of investigative news nonprofits and professional fact-checking groups. We argue that journalism’s “high-modern” era, with its broad alignment of economic and professional goals, highlighted competitive rather than collaborative elements of newswork. As that alignment unravels, journalists are engaging in explicit news sharing in pursuit of two intertwined goals: to increase the impact of their own reporting and to build institutional resources for public-affairs journalism to be practiced more widely across the field.
Reviews of:
Edgar Simpson, News, Public Affairs, and the Public Sphere in a Digital Nation: Rise... more Reviews of: Edgar Simpson, News, Public Affairs, and the Public Sphere in a Digital Nation: Rise of the Audience. Lexington Books: Lanham, MD, 2014; 274 pp.: ISBN 9780739190159, $90 (hbk). Gavin Ellis, Trust Ownership and the Future of News: Media Moguls and White Knights. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2014; 328 pp.: ISBN 9781137369437, £60 (hbk). Silvio Waisbord, Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in a Global Perspective. Polity Press: Malden, MA, 2013; 280 pp.: ISBN 9780745651927, $22.95 (pbk).
This report reviews the shape of the fact-checking landscape today. It pays special attention to ... more This report reviews the shape of the fact-checking landscape today. It pays special attention to the divide between partisan and nonpartisan fact-checkers, and between fact-checking and conventional reporting. It then examines what we know and what we don’t about the effectiveness of fact-checking, using the media footprint of various kinds of fact-checkers as an initial indicator of the influence these groups wield. Media analysis shows how political orientation limits fact-checkers’ impact in public discourse.
What style of journalistic factchecking is most convincing to readers? This study uses an online... more What style of journalistic factchecking is most convincing to readers? This study uses an online survey experiment to compare two prevailing approaches to correcting both consumer and political misinformation: factchecks that rely only on written analysis to assess claims, and those that also deploy a graphical meter or “truth scale.” Testing a series of simulated factchecks from a fictitious factchecking organization, GetTheFacts.org, we find first of all that both approaches were effective on the whole, with respondents who saw either format significantly more likely than a control group to correctly evaluate a claim that had been previously debunked. Does using a truth meter make a difference? In the case of a misleading advertising claim unrelated to politics, adding a meter to the written analysis appeared to make the correction more convincing. However, both formats proved equally effective in challenging political misinformation. Both formats also yielded their largest improvements among readers who selfidentified from the same party as the politician being checked. Although respondents scored best in identifying misinformation from a politician of the opposing party, seeing a correction made no significant difference in that case. Among other results, we also find that when given the choice, just over half of respondents preferred to see corrections that included a truth scale.
This article develops the concept of ‘annotative journalism’ through a close review of two muckra... more This article develops the concept of ‘annotative journalism’ through a close review of two muckraking investigations, 50 years apart, by the newsletter I.F. Stone’s Weekly and the website Talking Points Memo. These cases stand out in hindsight as investigative coups, though neither relied on the tools we associate with that kind of journalism: anonymous sources, secret documents, and so on. Instead, both investigations proceeded mainly through the analysis of published texts, in particular news reports, in light of a wider media and political critique. Annotative journalism unsettles core practices and assumptions of objective reporting. It rejects narrative coherence in favor of a set of critical textual practices, revealing reporting routines to the reader and building explicit arguments from and about the work of other journalists. And it troubles the professional distinction between reporting and opinion; these ‘scoops’ came through, not in spite of, the politics of the journalists who worked on them.
Global Media and Communication 7(2) intellectual property' as one of the major threats, along wit... more Global Media and Communication 7(2) intellectual property' as one of the major threats, along with terrorism, of a wide open internet. James Boyle describes quite a different danger in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Boyle, 2008), an informative and thoughtful case for rethinking our ever-stricter IP regimes. Boyle's book is lucidly and engagingly written; one believes Yochai Benkler, whose Wealth of Networks ) remains a touchstone for the key economic, legal, and democratic arguments for IP reform, when he blurbs that this is the 'first book' he'd give to someone wading into these intellectual waters. The small price of Boyle's strenuous fairness is only to bring into sharper relief the difficult question of why we get the IP rules we do. He wrestles with this question openly but not very satisfyingly.
Informed by Carey's cultural approach to communication, this article revisits the debate about th... more Informed by Carey's cultural approach to communication, this article revisits the debate about the historical impact of new communication technologies. Several studies have pointed to technology "affordances" as offering a useful middle ground between determinist and social constructivist perspectives. This article explores how the concept of affordance might be tweaked to emphasize what an emerging technology suggests in time to the cultures using and developing it. The second half of the article illustrates the discussion with a close examination of the affordances of blogging technology and especially of a novel communications genre: news-related blogs.
Page 1. The Story So Far What We Know About the Business ofDigitalJournalism A REPORT BY Bill Gru... more Page 1. The Story So Far What We Know About the Business ofDigitalJournalism A REPORT BY Bill Grueskin Ava Seave Lucas Graves Page 2. The Story So Far What We Know About the Business ofDigitalJournalism Columbia Journalism Review Books Page 3. ...
The success of populist candidates and rhetoric, coupled with a perceived degradation in politica... more The success of populist candidates and rhetoric, coupled with a perceived degradation in political discourse, have raised concerns over fraying democratic institutions even in stable wealthy democracies. These developments make particularly relevant the modest, grounded liberalism developed in Michael Schudson’s work, with its focus on the possibilities of actually existing democracy. They also offer a moment to ask what are the conditions and limits of the optimism that characterizes much of that work. This essay reviews the analytical and normative framework for understanding contemporary democracy that Schudson develops, centered on the notion of monitorial citizenship elaborated in The Good Citizen and The Rise of the Right to Know. I read this work against the grain to suggest that it represents a fusion of classically liberal and “critical cultural” perspectives. I draw attention to the messy but more or less reasonable public sphere that emerges in the episodes Schudson visits, underwritten by a quality of institutional coherence grounded in strong democratic norms governing elite behavior. Finally, I suggest that those conditions have depended on a tenuous historical balance between political consensus, on one hand, and the opening up of politics and public life Schudson chronicles so well, on the other.
This article presents a detailed ethnographic account of objective practice among professional fa... more This article presents a detailed ethnographic account of objective practice among professional fact checkers, reporters who specialize in assessing the truth of political claims. Some critics argue that political debate is inherently value-laden and defies objective fact checking ; I offer an alternative view highlighting the practical epistemology revealed in the news-work routines and discourse of working fact checkers. Drawing links between core concepts in the sociology of science and journalism studies, this analysis highlights how in moments of institutional unsettlement, verification relies on factual coherence, rather than straightforward correspondence. To develop this argument, I anatomize a fact check produced as a participant observer with a major national fact-checking organization.
While fact-checking has grown dramatically in the last decade, little is known about the relative... more While fact-checking has grown dramatically in the last decade, little is known about the relative effectiveness of different formats in correcting false beliefs or overcoming partisan resistance to new information. This article addresses that gap by using theories from communication and psychology to compare two prevailing approaches: An online experiment examined how the use of visual “truth scales” interacts with partisanship to shape the effectiveness of corrections. We find that truth scales make fact-checks more effective in some conditions. Contrary to theoretical predictions and the fears of some journalists, their use does not increase partisan backlash against the correction or the organization that produced it.
Why has fact-checking spread so quickly within U.S. political journalism? In the first field expe... more Why has fact-checking spread so quickly within U.S. political journalism? In the first field experiment conducted among reporters, we varied journalist exposure to messages that highlight either audience demand for fact-checking or the prestige it enjoys within the profession. Our results indicate that messages promoting the high status and journalistic values of fact-checking increased the prevalence of fact-checking coverage, while messages about audience demand were somewhat less successful. These findings suggest that political fact-checking is driven primarily by professional motives within journalism, a finding that helps us understand the process by which the practice spreads within the press as well as the factors that influence the behavior of journalists.
The last five years have seen a global surge in political fact-checking, reporting that specializ... more The last five years have seen a global surge in political fact-checking, reporting that specializes in debunking political misinformation. A growing occupational movement, originating in the United States but increasingly international in scope, has sought to legitimize fact-checking as unbiased journalism, to establish common standards and practices, and to secure reliable funding for this emerging genre. As a genuinely transnational professional movement which includes practitioners from multiple journalistic cultures as well as other fields, fact-checking offers a new site to consider whether and how professional journalism is meaningfully becoming globalized. This paper models a novel approach to mapping a diverse organizational landscape in terms of institutional ties to the fields of journalism, academia, and politics. Drawing on fieldwork from two international gatherings of fact-checkers, I array fact-checking outlets on a ternary graph and review their competing understandings of the mission, the target, and the practices of fact-checking. I highlight areas of convergence as well as divergence in this organizational milieu, focusing particular attention on boundaries not drawn—the willingness of professional journalists in this global movement to share jurisdictional authority with non-journalists. I conclude with suggestions for a comparative research agenda focused on this emergent area of practice.
Global Media and Communication 7(2) intellectual property' as one of the major threats, along wit... more Global Media and Communication 7(2) intellectual property' as one of the major threats, along with terrorism, of a wide open internet. James Boyle describes quite a different danger in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Boyle, 2008), an informative and thoughtful case for rethinking our ever-stricter IP regimes. Boyle's book is lucidly and engagingly written; one believes Yochai Benkler, whose Wealth of Networks ) remains a touchstone for the key economic, legal, and democratic arguments for IP reform, when he blurbs that this is the 'first book' he'd give to someone wading into these intellectual waters. The small price of Boyle's strenuous fairness is only to bring into sharper relief the difficult question of why we get the IP rules we do. He wrestles with this question openly but not very satisfyingly.
Organized journalism in every era offers examples of news sharing: cooperative practices by which... more Organized journalism in every era offers examples of news sharing: cooperative practices by which rival news outlets work together to produce or distribute news. Today, this behavior is being institutionalized by certain emergent news organizations. To understand news sharing, we argue, requires attention to how these journalists seek to not only practice but repair the field of journalism. This article analyzes news sharing as a form of field repair, drawing on ethnographic studies of investigative news nonprofits and professional fact-checking groups. We argue that journalism’s “high-modern” era, with its broad alignment of economic and professional goals, highlighted competitive rather than collaborative elements of newswork. As that alignment unravels, journalists are engaging in explicit news sharing in pursuit of two intertwined goals: to increase the impact of their own reporting and to build institutional resources for public-affairs journalism to be practiced more widely across the field.
Reviews of:
Edgar Simpson, News, Public Affairs, and the Public Sphere in a Digital Nation: Rise... more Reviews of: Edgar Simpson, News, Public Affairs, and the Public Sphere in a Digital Nation: Rise of the Audience. Lexington Books: Lanham, MD, 2014; 274 pp.: ISBN 9780739190159, $90 (hbk). Gavin Ellis, Trust Ownership and the Future of News: Media Moguls and White Knights. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2014; 328 pp.: ISBN 9781137369437, £60 (hbk). Silvio Waisbord, Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in a Global Perspective. Polity Press: Malden, MA, 2013; 280 pp.: ISBN 9780745651927, $22.95 (pbk).
This report reviews the shape of the fact-checking landscape today. It pays special attention to ... more This report reviews the shape of the fact-checking landscape today. It pays special attention to the divide between partisan and nonpartisan fact-checkers, and between fact-checking and conventional reporting. It then examines what we know and what we don’t about the effectiveness of fact-checking, using the media footprint of various kinds of fact-checkers as an initial indicator of the influence these groups wield. Media analysis shows how political orientation limits fact-checkers’ impact in public discourse.
What style of journalistic factchecking is most convincing to readers? This study uses an online... more What style of journalistic factchecking is most convincing to readers? This study uses an online survey experiment to compare two prevailing approaches to correcting both consumer and political misinformation: factchecks that rely only on written analysis to assess claims, and those that also deploy a graphical meter or “truth scale.” Testing a series of simulated factchecks from a fictitious factchecking organization, GetTheFacts.org, we find first of all that both approaches were effective on the whole, with respondents who saw either format significantly more likely than a control group to correctly evaluate a claim that had been previously debunked. Does using a truth meter make a difference? In the case of a misleading advertising claim unrelated to politics, adding a meter to the written analysis appeared to make the correction more convincing. However, both formats proved equally effective in challenging political misinformation. Both formats also yielded their largest improvements among readers who selfidentified from the same party as the politician being checked. Although respondents scored best in identifying misinformation from a politician of the opposing party, seeing a correction made no significant difference in that case. Among other results, we also find that when given the choice, just over half of respondents preferred to see corrections that included a truth scale.
This article develops the concept of ‘annotative journalism’ through a close review of two muckra... more This article develops the concept of ‘annotative journalism’ through a close review of two muckraking investigations, 50 years apart, by the newsletter I.F. Stone’s Weekly and the website Talking Points Memo. These cases stand out in hindsight as investigative coups, though neither relied on the tools we associate with that kind of journalism: anonymous sources, secret documents, and so on. Instead, both investigations proceeded mainly through the analysis of published texts, in particular news reports, in light of a wider media and political critique. Annotative journalism unsettles core practices and assumptions of objective reporting. It rejects narrative coherence in favor of a set of critical textual practices, revealing reporting routines to the reader and building explicit arguments from and about the work of other journalists. And it troubles the professional distinction between reporting and opinion; these ‘scoops’ came through, not in spite of, the politics of the journalists who worked on them.
Global Media and Communication 7(2) intellectual property' as one of the major threats, along wit... more Global Media and Communication 7(2) intellectual property' as one of the major threats, along with terrorism, of a wide open internet. James Boyle describes quite a different danger in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Boyle, 2008), an informative and thoughtful case for rethinking our ever-stricter IP regimes. Boyle's book is lucidly and engagingly written; one believes Yochai Benkler, whose Wealth of Networks ) remains a touchstone for the key economic, legal, and democratic arguments for IP reform, when he blurbs that this is the 'first book' he'd give to someone wading into these intellectual waters. The small price of Boyle's strenuous fairness is only to bring into sharper relief the difficult question of why we get the IP rules we do. He wrestles with this question openly but not very satisfyingly.
Informed by Carey's cultural approach to communication, this article revisits the debate about th... more Informed by Carey's cultural approach to communication, this article revisits the debate about the historical impact of new communication technologies. Several studies have pointed to technology "affordances" as offering a useful middle ground between determinist and social constructivist perspectives. This article explores how the concept of affordance might be tweaked to emphasize what an emerging technology suggests in time to the cultures using and developing it. The second half of the article illustrates the discussion with a close examination of the affordances of blogging technology and especially of a novel communications genre: news-related blogs.
Page 1. The Story So Far What We Know About the Business ofDigitalJournalism A REPORT BY Bill Gru... more Page 1. The Story So Far What We Know About the Business ofDigitalJournalism A REPORT BY Bill Grueskin Ava Seave Lucas Graves Page 2. The Story So Far What We Know About the Business ofDigitalJournalism Columbia Journalism Review Books Page 3. ...
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Papers by Lucas Graves
Edgar Simpson, News, Public Affairs, and the Public Sphere in a Digital Nation: Rise of the Audience. Lexington Books: Lanham, MD, 2014; 274 pp.: ISBN 9780739190159, $90 (hbk).
Gavin Ellis, Trust Ownership and the Future of News: Media Moguls and White Knights. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2014; 328 pp.: ISBN 9781137369437, £60 (hbk).
Silvio Waisbord, Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in a Global Perspective. Polity Press: Malden, MA, 2013; 280 pp.: ISBN 9780745651927, $22.95 (pbk).
Edgar Simpson, News, Public Affairs, and the Public Sphere in a Digital Nation: Rise of the Audience. Lexington Books: Lanham, MD, 2014; 274 pp.: ISBN 9780739190159, $90 (hbk).
Gavin Ellis, Trust Ownership and the Future of News: Media Moguls and White Knights. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2014; 328 pp.: ISBN 9781137369437, £60 (hbk).
Silvio Waisbord, Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in a Global Perspective. Polity Press: Malden, MA, 2013; 280 pp.: ISBN 9780745651927, $22.95 (pbk).